Maybe it's time to see how the sausage is made.
Chances are that in the last couple years, your life has been turned
upside down by a pandemic, a war, an economic meltdown, or some
combination of these. And you may feel that whatever you were lucky
enough to avoid may already be on its way to you. As the coming years
are sure to bring more uncertainty, maybe it's time to prepare? Let's
try to consider how our basic needs are met, as the individual and
collective bodies that we are.
Many of us have grown accustomed to an era in which a global logistical
orchestra serves our needs and whims, bringing food to our mouths with
surgical precision. Especially for cosmopolitan urbanites used to
traveling, sampling exotic cuisine, or spending money freely, these
delivery mechanisms may appear to have created the ultimate hostage
situation. Is it time to bite the invisible hand that feeds us? This
fragile political ecosystem has something in common with the fragility
of the natural ecosystem when forced to supply illusions of abundance.
Maybe it's time to see how the sausage is made.
In e-flux Food and Agriculture Reader, authors from around the world
reflect on food and agriculture as foundational expressions of life--as
sociality, history, and entanglement. By attending closely to something
that is the bedrock of security and survival, a world emerges where
power over production and consumption can be organized less like a
hegemonic system and more like a daily routine. Attending more closely
to systems of survival opens the door to another kind of abundance, one
that always evades scarcity. Food is absolutely political, but food is
also fundamentally pleasurable and social. Hannah Arendt allegedly asked
her students about the difference between love and desire. She then
answered her own question: If you desire strawberries, you eat them. If
you love strawberries, you grow them yourself.
Contributors
Autonomous farming collectives, Genaro Amaro Altamirano, Mary Walling
Blackburn, Carolina Caycedo, Sophie Chao, Lia Dostlieva, Alix Guibert,
Mythri Jegathesan, Ou Ning, Christian Nyampeta, Elizabeth Povinelli,
Enrique Del Risco, Martha Rosler, Vivien Sansour, Pelin Tan, Rachel
Vaughn, and others.
Copublished by e-flux journal
